Wednesday, April 13
5-7pm
The Brecht Forum, 451 West St. (West Side Highway), betw. Bank and Bethune, NEW YORK, NYClick here for directions

Free and open to the public!

Dr. Smarajit Jana, one of the founders of the DMSC (Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee) in Calcutta, India, and his colleague, a member of DMSC’s organizing committee, are visiting the US in April, and will be speaking at the Brecht Forum on Wednesday, April 13, 5-7pm.

The DMSC is a collective forum of 65,000 sex workers and serves as a model of labor organizing within the sex worker rights community. DMSC has been extremely successful in securing support for their work from the communist-led government of the Indian state of West Bengal, making the organization unique in the kinds of allies it has made in the course of doing its work. However, opportunities for sex workers from the Global South to meet with fellow activists, like-minded scholars and allies in the Global North are few and far between, unlike the opportunities for networking among anti-human-trafficking activists, which abound, due to governmental support for the abolition of prostitution. This exciting event will bring together sex workers’ and labor rights activists in New York with activists from India in a rich discussion on what’s happening, and what the way forward might be.

This event is sponsored by: the Sex Workers’ Outreach Project (SWOP)-NYC, The Brecht Forum, South Asia Solidarity Initiative, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a coalition of sex workers’ rights advocates in New York City.